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Research in thermoelectric (TE) quantum structures was greatly propelled by the prediction in the early 1990s of a significant boost in TE efficiency by quantum size effects. Recently, research interest has shifted from quantum size effects in conventional semiconductors toward new types of quantum materials (e.g., topological insulators [TIs], Weyl and Dirac semimetals) characterized by their nontrivial electronic topology. Bi2Te3, Sb2Te3, and Bi2Se3, established TE materials, are also TIs exhibiting a bulk bandgap and highly conductive and robust gapless surface states. The signature of the nontrivial electronic band structure on TE transport properties can be best verified in transport experiments using nanowires and thin films. However, even in nanograined bulk, the typical peculiarities in the transport properties of TIs can be seen. Finally, the remarkable transport properties of Dirac and Weyl semimetals are discussed.

Second language speakers often struggle to apply grammatical constraints such as subject–verb agreement. One hypothesis for this difficulty is that it results from problems suppressing syntactically unlicensed constituents in working memory. We investigated which properties of these constituents make them more likely to elicit errors: their grammatical distance to the subject head or their linear distance to the verb. We used double modifier constructions (e.g., the smell of the stables of the farmers), where the errors of native speakers are modulated by the linguistic relationships between the nouns in the subject phrase: second plural nouns, which are syntactically and semantically closer to the subject head, elicit more errors than third plural nouns, which are linearly closer to the verb (2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry). In order to dissociate between grammatical and linear distance, we compared embedded and coordinated modifiers, which were linearly identical but differed in grammatical distance. Using an attraction paradigm, we showed that German native speakers and proficient Russian speakers of German exhibited similar attraction rates and that their errors displayed a 2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry, which was more pronounced in embedded than in coordinated constructions. We suggest that both native and second language learners prioritize linguistic structure over linear distance in their agreement computations.

Since the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) was first put forward in 2006, it has inspired a growing body of research on grammatical processing in nonnative (L2) speakers. More than 10 years later, we think it is time for the SSH to be reconsidered in the light of new empirical findings and current theoretical assumptions about human language processing. The purpose of our critical commentary is twofold: to clarify some issues regarding the SSH and to sketch possible ways in which this hypothesis might be refined and improved to better account for L1 and L2 speakers’ performance patterns.

We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study that investigated late German–English bilinguals’ sensitivity to parasitic gaps inside subject islands. The online reading experiment was complemented by an offline scalar judgement task. The results from the offline task confirmed that for both native and non-native speakers, subject island environments must normally be non-finite in order to host a parasitic gap. The analysis of the reading-time data showed that, while native speakers posited parasitic gaps in non-finite environments only, the non-native group initially overgenerated parasitic gaps, showing delayed sensitivity to island-inducing cues during online processing. Taken together, our findings show that non-native comprehenders are sensitive to exceptions to island constraints that are not attested in their native language and also rare in the L2 input. They need more time than native comprehenders to compute the linguistic representations over which the relevant restrictions are defined, however.

Language is often ambiguous. For instance, verb-preposition strings such as look up can be interpreted either as a single verb + preposition combination leading to a literal interpretation (e.g., to look up the chimney), or can be interpreted as a so-called phrasal verb that requires a figurative interpretation (e.g., to look up the number). Past research has primarily used behavioral methodologies to investigate how first (L1) and second language (L2) learners deal with this phenomenon. However, event-related potentials (ERPs) are highly time sensitive and may shed additional light on this issue. In this chapter, we will first provide an overview of evidence on phrasal verb processing in L1 and L2 speakers. We will then present some of our own ERP data exploring phrasal verb processing in native speakers of English and native Arabic-speaking L2 learners of English. We will conclude with directions for future ERP research in this domain.

Psycholinguistic research has a long tradition in exploring how native speakers successfully master the complexities encountered in everyday language. Lexical and structural ambiguities form a vital part of this complexity and are a frequent feature of language. For instance, multiword expressions such as phrasal verbs (e.g.,run into), which can have a figurative interpretation (e.g.,to meet), have been estimated by some to form about one-third of the English verb vocabulary (Li, Zhang, Niu, Jiang, & Srihari, 2003).

It is well established that symmetry has an important influence on the properties of materials, but the topology of electronic states might be an even more fundamental property. Topological insulators (TIs) are new states of matter based on the topology in the electronic band structure. Relativistic effects are the origin of the topologically non-trivial electronic structure, and the new state of matter has been realized in two-dimensional quantum well structures and three-dimensional bulk crystals of heavy elements and compounds. TI materials have an insulating gap in the bulk, and robust metallic edge/surface states on the boundary, which is robust against disorder and leads to unique spin and charge transport properties. Examples of TIs include HgTe/CdTe quantum wells, Bi-Sb-alloys, Bi2Se3, and half-Heusler compounds.

This article investigates the nature of preposition copying and preposition pruning structures in present-day English. We begin by illustrating the two phenomena and consider how they might be accounted for in syntactic terms, and go on to explore the possibility that preposition copying and pruning arise for processing reasons. We then report on two acceptability judgement experiments examining the extent to which native speakers of English are sensitive to these types of ‘error’ in language comprehension. Our results indicate that preposition copying creates redundancy rather than ungrammaticality, whereas preposition pruning creates processing problems for comprehenders that may render it unacceptable in timed (but not necessarily in untimed) judgement tasks. Our findings furthermore illustrate the usefulness of combining corpus studies and experimentally elicited data for gaining a clearer picture of usage and acceptability, and the potential benefits of examining syntactic phenomena from both a theoretical and a processing perspective.

Using the eye-movement monitoring technique in two reading comprehension experiments, this study investigated the timing of constraints on wh-dependencies (so-called island constraints) in first- and second-language (L1 and L2) sentence processing. The results show that both L1 and L2 speakers of English are sensitive to extraction islands during processing, suggesting that memory storage limitations affect L1 and L2 comprehenders in essentially the same way. Furthermore, these results show that the timing of island effects in L1 compared to L2 sentence comprehension is affected differently by the type of cue (semantic fit versus filled gaps) signaling whether dependency formation is possible at a potential gap site. Even though L1 English speakers showed immediate sensitivity to filled gaps but not to lack of semantic fit, proficient German-speaking learners of English as a L2 showed the opposite sensitivity pattern. This indicates that initial wh-dependency formation in L2 processing is based on semantic feature matching rather than being structurally mediated as in L1 comprehension.

We report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent, thereby violating binding condition A. Our native speaker controls, in contrast, showed evidence of applying condition A immediately during processing. Together, our findings show that L2 learners’ initial focusing on a structurally inaccessible antecedent cannot be due to first language influence and is also independent of whether the inaccessible antecedent c-commands the reflexive. This suggests that unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers of English initially attempt to interpret reflexives through discourse-based coreference assignment rather than syntactic binding.

Half-Heusler (HH) and especially TiNiSn-based alloys have shown high potential as thermoelectric (TE) materials for power generation applications. The reported transport properties show, however, a significant spread of results, due mainly to the difficulty in fabricating single-phase HH samples in these multicomponent and multiphased systems. In particular, little attention has been paid to the influence of the various minority phases on the TE performance of these compounds. A clear understanding of these issues is mandatory for the design of improved and stable TE HH-based composites. This study examines the structural and compositional influence of the residual metallic (Sn) and intermetallic phases (mainly Ti6Sn5 and the Heusler compound TiNi2Sn) on the TE properties of the TiNiSn HH compounds processed by spark plasma sintering.

In this study, the influence of plausibility information on the real-time processing of locally ambiguous (“garden path”) sentences in a nonnative language is investigated. Using self-paced reading, we examined how advanced Greek-speaking learners of English and native speaker controls read sentences containing temporary subject–object ambiguities, with the ambiguous noun phrase being either semantically plausible or implausible as the direct object of the immediately preceding verb. Besides providing evidence for incremental interpretation in second language processing, our results indicate that the learners were more strongly influenced by plausibility information than the native speaker controls in their on-line processing of the experimental items. For the second language learners an initially plausible direct object interpretation lead to increased reanalysis difficulty in “weak” garden-path sentences where the required reanalysis did not interrupt the current thematic processing domain. No such evidence of on-line recovery was observed, in contrast, for “strong” garden-path sentences that required more substantial revisions of the representation built thus far, suggesting that comprehension breakdown was more likely here.

The synthesis, structure, and magnetic and transport properties of solid solutions Sr2FeRe1-xFexO6 (0≤x≤0.5) are reported. A structural evolution in the solid solutions from a double perovskite to perovskite is observed with increasing Fe/Re disorder. Except for the metallic parent compound all members of the series are semiconducting. For the Fe-doped samples a change from ferrimagnetic interactions in the parent compound to a complex superposition of ferrimagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions was observed. The magnetic moment decreases with x, whereas the Curie temperature TC remains unaffected. The magnetic and Mössbauer data suggest Fe to act as a redox-buffer.

We report the results from two experiments investigating proficient Japanese-speaking learners' processing of reflexive object pronouns in English as a second language (L2). Experiment 1 used a timed grammaticality judgement task to assess learners' sensitivity to binding Principle A under processing pressure, and Experiment 2 investigated the time-course of reflexive anaphor resolution during L2 reading using the eye-movement monitoring technique. Taken together, our results show that despite having demonstrated native-like knowledge of reflexive binding in corresponding untimed tasks, the learners processed English reflexives differently from native speakers in that they took into consideration a matching discourse-prominent but binding-theoretically inappropriate antecedent when first encountering a reflexive. This suggests that unlike what has been reported in corresponding monolingual processing research (Sturt, 2003), initial antecedent search in L2 English is not constrained by binding Principle A.

The ability to process the linguistic input in real time is crucial for successfully acquiring a language, and yet little is known about how language learners comprehend or produce language in real time. Against this background, we have conducted a detailed study of grammatical processing in language learners using experimental psycholinguistic techniques and comparing different populations (mature native speakers, child first language [L1] and adult second language [L2] learners) as well as different domains of language (morphology and syntax). This article presents an overview of the results from this project and of other previous studies, with the aim of explaining how grammatical processing in language learners differs from that of mature native speakers. For child L1 processing, we will argue for a continuity hypothesis claiming that the child's parsing mechanism is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Instead, empirical differences between child and mature speaker's processing can be explained by other factors such as the child's limited working memory capacity and by less efficient lexical retrieval. In nonnative (adult L2) language processing, some striking differences to native speakers were observed in the domain of sentence processing. Adult learners are guided by lexical–semantic cues during parsing in the same way as native speakers, but less so by syntactic information. We suggest that the observed L1/L2 differences can be explained by assuming that the syntactic representations adult L2 learners compute during comprehension are shallower and less detailed than those of native speakers.

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic processing in child and adult native speakers, and nonnative speakers who acquired their L2 after childhood and for whom their L1 is the dominant language. With respect to child L1 processing, we argued for a continuity of parsing hypothesis claiming that the child's structural parser is basically the same as that of mature speakers and does not change over time. Adult L2 learners, in contrast, were seen to underuse syntactic information during sentence processing and to rely more on lexical–semantic cues to interpretation. To account for the observed L1/L2 differences in processing, we proposed the shallow structure hypothesis (SSH) according to which the representations adult L2 learners compute during processing contain less syntactic detail than those of child and adult native speakers.

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from
different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek)
and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online
reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance
wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence
of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2
learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase
directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the
subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This
finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative
comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre
for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience,
University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research
reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00
213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully
acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the
audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University
Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous
SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta
Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We
also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their
prepublication manuscript available to us.

This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study, in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all. We argue that children, monolingual adults, and adult L2 learners differ in the extent to which they are guided by phrase structure and lexical–semantic information during sentence processing.

The edited volume under review contains an introduction followed by fifteen articles, most of which grew out of a workshop on wh-scope marking held in December 1995 at the University of Tübingen. Earlier versions of twelve of the contributions to the present collection have previously appeared in the workshop proceedings edited by Lutz and Müller (1996). Several of these have undergone rather substantial changes, though, and three articles (Cheng, Cole and Hermon, and Horvath), as well as the editors' introduction, were not included in the earlier collection of working papers at all.

In German, complex wh-interrogatives can optionally be formed by inserting the 3rd person neuter w h-pronoun was in the matrix [Spec, CP] position instead of long-distance wh-raising. It is generally assumed that “expletive” was serves as a placeholder for a contentful wh-expression lower down in the sentence that substitutes for it at the level of semantic interpretation. It can be shown, however, that the putative wh-expletive was in German is actually a CP-proform basegenerated in matrix object position, and that it is not subject to expletive replacement at LF. As an alternative to previous accounts, I propose a complex predicate analysis of the German was … w construction according to which was is a [thetas]-marked object pronoun capable of licensing a predicative CP in V-complement position. This analysis is consistent with Rothstein's (1995) claim that true object expletives do not exist.*